Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

10 PLANET OF SLUMS
Across all cultures 0 f the entire world, they share specific common char­
acteristics: a structure of completely different urban environments
which at first sight is diffuse and disorganized with individual islands of
geometrically structured patterns, a structure without a clear centre, but
therefore with many more or less sharply functionally specialized areas,
networks and nodes.28
Such "extended metropolitan regions," writes geographer David
Drakakis-Smith, referring specifically to Delhi, "represent a fusion of
urban and regional development in which the distinction between what
is urban and rural has become blurred as cities expand along corridors
of communication, by-passing or surrounding small towns and villages
which subsequently experience in situ changes in function and occupa­
tion."29 In Indonesia, where a similar process of rural/urban
hybridization is far advanced in Jabotabek (the greater Jakarta region),
researchers call these novel landuse patterns desakotas ("city villages'')
and argue whether they are transitional landscapes or a dramatic new
species of urbanism.3D
An analogous debate is taking place amongst Latin American urbanists
as they confront the emergence of polycentric urban systems
without clear rural/urban boundaries. Geographers Adrian Aguilar and
Peter Ward advance the concept of "region-based urbanization" to char­
acterize contemporary peri-urban development around Mexico City, Sao
Paulo, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. "Lower rates of metropolitan
growth have coincided with a more intense circulation of commodities,
people and capital between the city center and its hinterland, with ever
more diffuse frontiers between the urban and the rural, and a manufacturing
deconcentration towards the metropolitan periphery, and in
28 Thomas Sieverts, Cities Without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt,
London 2003, p. 3.
29 Drakakis-Smith, Third World Cities, p. 21.
30 See overview in T. G. McGee, "The Emergence of Des akota Regions in Asia:
Expanding a Hypothesis," in Norton Ginsburg, Bruce Koppel, and T. G. McGee
(eds), The Extended Metropolis: Settlement Transition in As ia, Honolulu 1991. Philip Kelly,
in his book on Manila, agrees with McGee about the specificity of the Southeast
Asian path of urbanization, but argues that desakota landscapes are unstable, with
agriculture slowly being squeezed out. Kelly, Everydqy Urbanizatio n: The Social Dynanncs
of Development in Manila's Extended Metropolitan Region, London 1999, pp. 284-86.
THE URBAN CLIMACTERIC 11
particular beyond into the peri-urban spaces or penumbra that surround
mega-cities." Aguilar and Ward believe that " it is in this peri-urban space
that the reproduction of labor is most likely to be concentrated in the
world's largest cities in the 21st century."3!
In any case, the new and old don't easily mix, and on the desakota
outskirts of Colombo "communities are divided, with the outsiders
and insiders unable to build relationships and coherent communities.'>32
But the process, as anthropologist Magdalena Nock points out in
regard to Mexico, is irreversible: "Globalization has increased the
movement of people, goods, services, information, news, products,
and money, and thereby the presence of urban characteristics in rural
areas and of rural traits in urban centers."33
Back to Dickens
The dynamics of Third World urbanization both recapitulate and
confound the precedents of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
Europe and North America. In China the greatest industrial revolution
in history is the Archimedean lever shifting a population the size of
Europe's from rural villages to smog-choked, sky-climbing cities: since
the market reforms of the late 1970s it is estimated that more than 200
million Chinese have moved from rural areas to cities. Another 250 or
300 million people - the next "peasant flood" - are expected to follow
in coming decades.34 As a result of this staggering influx, 166 Chinese
31 Adrian Aguilar and Peter Ward, "Globalization, Regional Development, and
Mega-City Expansion in Latin America: Analyzing Mexico City's Peri-Urban
Hinterland," Cities 20:1 (2003), pp. 4, 18. The authors claim that desakota-like development
does not occur in Africa: "Instead city growth tends to be firmly urban and
large-city based, and is contained within clearly defined boundaries. There is not metaurban
or peri-urban development that is tied to, and driven by, processes, in the urban
core," p. 5. But certainly Gauteng (Witwatersrand) must be accounted as an example
of "regional urbanization" fully analogous to Latin American examples.
32 Ranjith Dayaratne and Raja Samarawickrama, "Empowering Communities:
The Peri-Urban Areas of Colombo," Environment and Urbanization 15:1 (April 2003),
p. 102. (See also, in the same issue, L. van den Berg, . M. van Wijk, and Pham Van Hoi,
"The Transformation of Agricultural and Rur al Life Downsteam of Hanoi.")
33 Magdalena Nock, "The Mexican Peasantry and the Ejido in the Neo-liberal
Period," in Deborah Bryceson, Crist6bal Kay, and Jos Mooij (eds), Dis appeming
Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, As ia and Latin Ametica, London 2000, p. 173.
34 Financial Times, 16 December 2003, 27 July 2004.